The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.

Harvard librarians probably didn’t guess the blowback they were in for when they published this innocent online guide to “Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda”. The guide, which includes otherwise useful/basic tips like “using library databases is a near-foolproof way to find credible information”, also links to Merrimack College professor Melissa Zimdars’ sprawling and much-debated list of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical ‘News’ Sources,” which currently includes 921 sites tagged in a number of categories including “fake,” “satire,” “conspiracy,” “unreliable,” and “political.” Sites like Fusion, National Review, and The Onion are listed alongside actual fake news sites like denverguardian.com and David Duke’s website. (Also on the list: IJR, the only site that got a reporter on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s plane to Asia, and which had a retracted-article snafu just yesterday.)

It’s confusing, to say the least, and Harvard’s inclusion of this list in its guide has led to a lot of criticism as well as accusations that the entire guide was actually written by Zimdars, which it was not. (Nor is her list “a Harvard study.” Also, for the record, Nieman Lab is part of Harvard, but we didn’t have anything to do with it.) “Instead of targeting stories that are completely false…the Left applies the label of ‘fake news’ to outlets that report factual stories but draw political conclusions from them — in other words, they call everything with which they disagree ‘fake news,'” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapirowrote in National Review. (The left: not the only culprit here.) Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adamsinterviewed Zimdars and suggests, “One problem with her database is that it groups 100 percent false stories, which are knowingly fabricated from thin air, with coverage she deems either too political, too clickbait-y or generally unreliable. There’s an obvious difference, however, between what the Daily Caller does and what a group of fake news teens in Macedonia do. Perhaps separate lists would help.”

When Harvard first published its research guide, it described Zimdars’ list as a “huge list of fake news sites.” That’s been updated to “An informal list compiled by students for a class taught by Melissa Zimdars at Merrimack College.”

Kremlin-affiliated site Russia Today also launched a fake-news-detecting site called FakeCheck. “It’s almost hard to remember now, but the concept of ‘fake news’ was largely nonpartisan as recently as five months ago, when it referred mostly to intentionally fabricated stories from faux outlets posing as real news organizations…” Will Oremuswrote at Slate. “Now, it seems, ‘fake news’ can mean ‘news that runs counter to the interests of Russian propaganda organizations.'”

Whoopi Goldberg says she’s suing James McDaniel, the guy behind the “satirical” fake news siteThe Underground Reportthat I covered last week. (The site “reported” that Goldberg had condemned Carryn Owens, the widow of the Navy SEAL killed in January’s Yemen raid.) “If you’re going to involve someone in fake news, you should have their permission. You shouldn’t be able to put stuff out there, ’cause clearly you don’t care what could’ve happened to me or to my family,” she said on The View on Monday. The Underground Report has been taken down; McDaniel claimed (in a now-cached post) that while “it is true that when I started the website I was mostly playing and not expecting to gain a ton of attention for my work, by the time I wrote the story about Goldberg, the project had grown into a full-blown experiment with significant social and political consequences involving the spread and belief in off the wall fake news stories and how they relate to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance in individuals who touted them.” The responsibility, he argued, lies with readers: “Why had Whoopi singled me out and not placed virtually any of the responsibilities on the people who read and shared the articles, often accompanied with captions of intense hatred? Why was the bigger problem of today’s fake news culture perpetuated by readers not a greater target of criticism?” (Related-ish, Mark Zuckerberg this week: “No one in our community wants fake information. Everyone wants real information.”)

“You spread stories because you know that they’re likely to be a kind of litmus test, and the way people react will show whether they’re prepared to side with you or not.” Julie Becktakes a look at why it’s so hard to change people’s minds, in The Atlantic. Anthropologist and psychologist Pascal Boyer: “If you encounter 10 people who seem to have roughly the same idea, then it fools your system into thinking that it must be a probable idea because lots of people agree with it. One thing you assume, unconsciously, is that these 10 people came to the same belief independently. You don’t think that nine of these are just repeating something that the 10th one said.”

The list of “Fake News” endorsed by the Harvard Library was naive and offensive. The library, and the “fake news” judges it endorsed, were explicit in their endorsement of these criteria: a) the mainstream media of US and allied countries are trustworthy arbiters of what is fact and what is a “controversial” or “conspiracy” claim, and b) that news sources which include articles which endorse such controversial claims – as opinion, hypothesis, theory, or news – should be flagged, in their entirety as “fake news” sites, and preferably avoided. In practice, the mainstream media tends to report any public claim by the U.S. Pentagon, CIA, FBI, NSA, NSC, or State Department and treat it as factual. Claims from independent researchers or press outlets supported by countries not politically aligned with the US that go against the US State approved claims are treated as controversial on that basis, even when they have far greater evidential support than the U.S. government narrative. In their book “Manufacturing Consent”, Herman and Chomsky documented the extreme bias of a mainstream U.S. media, in the years 1962-1984, that was simply unwilling to report foreign policy news that went against the dominant U.S. government narrative. Whereas CIA covert warfare in Vietnam and Laos began in the late 1950s, the mainstream media had still not presented the public with an accurate picture of these events by the end of the War in 1975. Even today, a large majority of the U.S. public remains in under the spell of the mainstream media’s misleading, censored, and self-censored reporting on the Indochina wars. The small, independent journals which were more critical, would all have been labeled as “fake news” according to the criteria endorsed by the Harvard Library and Ms. Owens article. In the present day, I follow a large number of independent news sites that commonly criticize the activities of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon. Some of them even run articles on the close historical relationships between CIA propaganda psyops and MSM outlets such as Washington Post, New York Times, Time/Life, CNN, etc. Virtually all of these critical sites were included in the library’s list of “fake news”.

RikJespersen

James McDaniel’s plaint that re-posters of his fake news should be taken to task is pathetic. Why post this bullshit in the first place, Mr McDaniel? Why then try to contrive some twisted rationale that somehow it’s really okay? Do you expose yourself on the subway then blame those who saw you for telling others about it? Grow the f**k up.

Ghostship

Does Will Oremus understand that the United States has its own propaganda sites such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, etc. which have been used to spread American propaganda back to Americans. As for much of the mainstream media, they are little more than domestic propaganda outlets for their government. For, example, the recent claims about the hacking of a Vermont electricity utility, the yellowcake and aluminum tubes clams dating back to the Iraq war, etc. Perhaps the American government and media outlets are not so different from their Russian equivalents.